Earlier this year I moved away from flickr to self-hosting my photo library here at The Quantum Garden Website. The IMatch to Socials solution was powerful except flickr was extracting EXIF information from the photos I didn’t want shared and I couldn’t solve that problem. Using the replacement IMatch to Site solution I converted jpeg to webp format which forced me down the path of using ExifTool to copy metadata from jpeg to webp—and only the metadata I wanted.
I spent too many hours getting Quartz to display photos the way I wanted.
Then a couple of weeks ago I had a need to share some photos with a friend. My first thought was, “flickr would make this easy,” and that got me thinking. Long story short I spent evenings last week and most of the weekend retro-fitting the flickr upload code into IMatch to Site and uploading images with only the metadata I’m willing to share. It’s working a treat and you can see the results at https://flickr.com/dbuchan.
Flickr has distinct advantages over my roll-your-own solution. It looks better, is easier to manage, and provides a bigger audience for my photos. So much so that I was lucky to have the photo below recognised by flickr’s explore algorithm. 500 of the most interesting photos are shared each day.
Bendigo Cemetery Chapel in the fog
From nothing, my image of the chapel in Bendigo’s cemetery on a very foggy winter morning has had 4,590 views, received 150+ likes and invitations to join other groups. I’m very grateful and feel validated as a photographer.